DETROIT COMMITTED SUICIDE - FOR A PRICE
(C)1992 Alan M. Schwartz
The close of 1991 witnessed the American car industry - GM,
Chrysler, and especially Ford - hemorrhage billions of dollars of
red ink. Their combined losses were greater than the gross
national products of more than 20 countries. One of every three
cars sold in this country is wholly of Japanese manufacture.
Most of the domestic remainder are built of Asian parts. German
motorcars do quite well. The American economy fabricates less
than one fifth of US road hardware sold annually. The end of
1991 saw 20,000 auto workers laid off, the closure of dozens of
domestic car factories, that deluge of losses greater than any
since the founding of the Republic, and the self-bestowal of six
and seven figure performance bonuses to members of the highest
echelons of Detroit automobile executives. Some would call this
a compassionless and savagely self-serving fiduciary atrocity.
When managerial rewards are independent of performance, private
industry operates like our Government, albeit without the IRS to
extort operating funds and the indefatigable printing presses of
the Department of the Treasury to make up the difference.
Nonsense. Were Detroit a bookie joint, those end-of-year wallet
caresses would be the vigorish!
The great tragedy of American heavy industry is not antiquated
equipment. It is not a ponderous, ineffective middle-aged
management selfish of its prerogatives and actively succeeding in
excluding younger and more competent rivals. It is not a dying
government sinking its vampirish tax fangs into net cash
retained. It is not insane government regulation nurtured by
quietly delivered special interest funds and blooming to yield
political exigency. The great tragedy of the American blue
collar laborer is that he is in his 50s. Open-ended
disbursements in the form of health care and pension compensation
will implode the myth that this country's economy is solvent. We
will shrivel into Third World economic status as capital to
sustain investment is sucked into entitlement payments, buying
heart bypass operations and adult Pampers. Those whose weekly
green was bled white against promises that their retirement would
be centrally administered and infinitely bounteous now want that
return on their investment. The claims of aging blue collar
workers must be invalidated, or we all will be destroyed.
Private pension plans were never designed for eventual
disbursement of collected and earned assets to their claimants,
that clutching amoeboid rabble of Baby Boomers. The avalanches
of cash wielded by pension funds and insurance companies, and the
Social Security Administration, are the daily financial fuel
running the social institutions hiding our real insolvency. It
empowers Wall Street manipulations that generate managerial
commissions, feeding bountiful percentages of the gross into the
few select pockets of those who neatly arranged the system
itself. To return even a fraction of the swag to the people who
sacrificed all their working lives to support its cancerous
growth is unthinkable, and ruinous. It would be the end of the
system. Neither organized nor white collar crime exists to
relinquish its social and economic dominance. Trillion dollar
Government hustles utterly overshadow these billion dollar
amateur efforts.
Amateur private sector embezzlement and power brokerage must take
a back seat to a true champions of the art of the swindle,
Federal malfeasance and Federal malevolence. For every civilian
worker dunned by FICA levies there exists a Federal worker
claiming an even more munificent largess while having
manufactured precisely nothing of economic value in return. That
class of parasite has a private pension fund in place of and
independent of the Social Security system. What government
worker would be stupid enough to invest in a program he
administered by law for others, to his own advantage? Consider
the bureaucracy of the American police state - the debauched
stormtroopers of the IRS, tax accountants, record keepers,
pecuniary administrators and their armies of MBA dilettantes,
lawyers for the prosecution and the defense, a private court
system, and the pall of fear that continuously festers in your
heart. It is a neat way to run a country, isn't it?
The last act of this play will be bloody. How may we
disenfranchise fifty million citizens without fomenting civil
insurrection? Detroit's best efforts hardly put 0.1% of the
problem to rest. A conventionally fought World War III stoked
with middle-aged soldiers would be immediately suspect, as would
a mysterious and lethal malady that only struck down Social
Security recipients. I expect that our Government, omnipotent in
its granting of its own members' perquisites and power, will
simply default after passing the laws necessary to legally commit
the act. We have an abundance of young soldiers who assuredly
anticipate that their FICA taxes will provide for their own
Government-funded retirement.